Ewan MacColl is widely recognized as a key figure in the English folk revival, who tried to convey traditional music to a mass audience. Dominant in the movement during the 1950s and much of the 1960s, his position has come under attack in more recent years from some scholars. While it would be arrogant to claim to 'set the record straight', this book will contribute significantly to the debate surrounding MacColl's importance. MacColl gave two extended interviews with co-editor Giovanni Vacca in 1987 and 1988, not long before his death, and these provide the impetus for a re-examination of his methods, his politics and his aesthetic aims. The book also provides critical overviews of MacColl's activities in the revival and of his practices, particularly as writer and singer. The time is ripe for such a contribution, following Peter Cox's study of the Radio Ballads, and in the context of biographies by Joan Littlewood and Frankie Armstrong. The contributions locate MacColl in his own historical context, attempting to understand some of the characteristic techniques through which he was able to write and sing such extraordinary songs, which capture so well for others the detail and flavour of their lives. Great emphasis is placed on the importance of seeing MacColl as not only a British, but a European folk activist, through discussion of his hitherto barely known work in Italy, enabling a re-contextualization of his work within a broader European context. The interviews themselves are fluent and fascinating narrations in which MacColl discusses his life, music, and experiences in the theatre and in the folk music revival as well as with a series of issues concerning folk music, politics, history, language, art and other theoretical issues, offering a complete description of all the repertories of the British Isles. Peggy Seeger contributes a Foreword to the collection.

Emphasizing the diversity of twentieth-century collage practices, Rona Cran's book explores the role that it played in the work of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan. For all four, collage was an important creative catalyst, employed cathartically, aggressively, and experimentally. Collage's catalytic effect, Cran argues, enabled each to overcome a potentially destabilizing crisis in representation. Cornell, convinced that he was an artist and yet hampered by his inability to draw or paint, used collage to gain access to the art world and to show what he was capable of given the right medium. Burroughs' formal problems with linear composition were turned to his advantage by collage, which enabled him to move beyond narrative and chronological requirement. O'Hara used collage to navigate an effective path between plastic art and literature, and to choose the facets of each which best suited his compositional style. Bob Dylan's self-conscious application of collage techniques elevated his brand of rock-and-roll to a level of heightened aestheticism. Throughout her book, Cran shows that to delineate collage stringently as one thing or another is to severely limit our understanding of the work of the artists and writers who came to use it in non-traditional ways.

Simon Frith has been one of the most important figures in the emergence and subsequent development of popular music studies. From his earliest academic publication, The Sociology of Rock (1978), through to his recent work on the live music industry in the UK, in his desire to 'take popular music seriously' he has probably been cited more than any other author in the field. Uniquely, he has combined this work with a lengthy career as a music critic for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic. The contributions to this volume of essays and memoirs seek to honour Frith's achievements, but they are not merely 'about Frith'. Rather, they are important interventions by leading scholars in the field, including Robert Christgau, Antoine Hennion, Peter J. Martin and Philip Tagg. The focus on 'sociology and industry' and 'aesthetics and values' reflect major themes in Frith's own work, which can also be found within popular music studies more generally. As such the volume will become an essential resource for those working in popular music studies, as well as in musicology, sociology and cultural and media studies.

The New York Times bestseller and the definitive portrait of Kurt Cobain--as relevant as ever, as we remember the impact of Cobain on our culture twenty-five years after his death--now with a new preface and an additional final chapter from acclaimed author Charles R. Cross. It has been twenty-five years since Kurt Cobain died by his own hand in April 1994; it was an act of will that typified his short, angry, inspired life. Veteran music journalist Charles R. Cross fuses his intimate knowledge of the Seattle music scene with his deep compassion for his subject in this extraordinary story of artistic brilliance and the pain that extinguished it. Based on more than four hundred interviews; four years of research; exclusive access to Cobain's unpublished diaries, lyrics, and family photos; and a wealth of documentation, Heavier Than Heaven traces Cobain's life from his early days in a double-wide trailer outside of Aberdeen, Washington, to his rise to fame, success, and the adulation of a generation. Charles Cross has written a new preface for this edition, giving readers context for the time in which the book was written, six years after Kurt's death, and reminding everyone how fresh that cultural experience was when the interviews for the book were done. The new final chapter will update the story since, regarding investigations into Cobain's death, Nirvana's induction into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, and how their place in rock history has only risen over the decades.

K-pop, described by Time Magazine in 2012 as "South Korea's greatest export", has rapidly achieved a large worldwide audience of devoted fans largely through distribution over the Internet. This book examines the phenomenon, and discusses the reasons for its success. It considers the national and transnational conditions that have played a role in K-pop's ascendancy, and explores how they relate to post-colonial modernisation, post-Cold War politics in East Asia, connections with the Korean diaspora, and the state-initiated campaign to accumulate soft power. As it is particularly concerned with fandom and cultural agency, it analyses fan practices, discourses, and underlying psychologies within their local habitus as well as in expanding topographies of online networks. Overall, the book addresses the question of how far "Asian culture" can be global in a truly meaningful way, and how popular culture from a "marginal" nation has become a global phenomenon.

Until his death aged thirty-three in 1982, Lester Bangs wrote wired, rock 'n' roll pieces on Iggy Pop, The Clash, John Lennon, Kraftwerk, Lou Reed. As a rock critic, he had an eagle-eye for distinguishing the pre-packaged imitation from the real thing; written in a conversational, wisecracking, erotically charged style, his hallucinatory hagiographies and excoriating take-downs reveal an iconoclast unafraid to tell it like it is. To his journalism he brought the talent of a great a renegade Beat poet, and his essays, reviews and scattered notes convey the electric thrill of a music junky indulging the habit of a lifetime. As Greil Marcus writes in his introduction, 'What this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.'

Vibe Merchants offers an insider's perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. This rare perspective, derived from interviews and ethnographic methodologies, focuses on the actual details of music-making practice, rationalized in the context of the economic and creative forces that locally drive music production. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that has been acknowledged as being different to that of Europe and North America. The book leads to a broadening of our understanding of how Jamaican Popular Music emerged, developed and functions, thus providing an engaging example of the important relationship between music, technology and culture that will appeal to a wide range of scholars.

Turbo-folk music is the most controversial form of popular culture in the new states of former Yugoslavia. Theoretically ambitious and innovative, this book is a new account of popular music that has been at the centre of national, political and cultural debates for over two decades. Beginning with 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia, Uros Cvoro explores the cultural and political paradoxes of turbo-folk: described as 'backward' music, whose misogynist and Serb nationalist iconography represents a threat to cosmopolitanism, turbo-folk's iconography is also perceived as a 'genuinely Balkan' form of resistance to the threat of neo-liberalism. Taking as its starting point turbo-folk's popularity across national borders, Cvoro analyses key songs and performers in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. The book also examines the effects of turbo on the broader cultural sphere - including art, film, sculpture and architecture - twenty years after its inception and popularization. What is proposed is a new way of reading the relationship of contemporary popular music to processes of cultural, political and social change - and a new understanding of how fundamental turbo-folk is to the recent history of former Yugoslavia and its successor states.

Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond represents the first interdisciplinary volume of chapters on an intricate cultural field that can be experienced and interpreted in manifold ways, whether in Ireland (The Republic of Ireland and/or Northern Ireland), among its diaspora(s), or further afield. While each contributor addresses particular themes viewed from discrete perspectives, collectively the book contemplates whether 'music in Ireland' can be regarded as one interrelated plane of cultural and/or national identity, given the various conceptions and contexts of both Ireland (geographical, political, diasporic, mythical) and Music (including a proliferation of practices and genres) that give rise to multiple sites of identification. Arranged in the relatively distinct yet interweaving parts of 'Historical Perspectives', 'Recent and Contemporary Production' and 'Cultural Explorations', its various chapters act to juxtapose the socio-historical distinctions between the major style categories most typically associated with music in Ireland - traditional, classical and popular - and to explore a range of dialectical relationships between these musical styles in matters pertaining to national and cultural identity. The book includes a number of chapters that examine various movements (and 'moments') of traditional music revival from the late eighteenth century to the present day, as well as chapters that tease out various issues of national identity pertaining to individual composers/performers (art music, popular music) and their audiences. Many chapters in the volume consider mediating influences (infrastructural, technological, political) and/or social categories (class, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, age) in the interpretation of music production and consumption. Performers and composers discussed include U2, Raymond Deane, Afro-Celt Sound System, E.J. Moeran, Seamus Ennis, Kevin O'Connell, Stiff Little Fingers, Frederick May, Arnold

Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets' boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.

An instant best-seller when originally published in 1994, this expanded and updated edition of "The Rice Room" tells of growing up with a double identity - Chinese and American. Ben Fong-Torres was torn between an alluring American lifestyle - including Elvis and rock 'n' roll - and the traditional cultural heritage his proud immigrant parents struggled to instill in their five children. Now illustrated with personal family photographs as well as photos of the author with various celebrities, Fong-Torres rounds out his life story with a new final chapter.

This collection of essays critically engages with factors relating to black urban life and cultural representation in the post-civil rights era, using Ice-T and his myriad roles as musician, actor, writer, celebrity, and industrialist as a vehicle through which to interpret and understand the African American experience. Over the past three decades, African Americans have faced a number of new challenges brought about by changes in the political, economic and social structure of America. Furthermore, this vastly changed social landscape has produced a number of resonant pop-cultural trends that have proved to be both innovative and admired on the one hand, and contentious and divisive on the other. Ice-T's iconic and multifarious career maps these shifts. This is the first book that, taken as a whole, looks at a black cultural icon's manipulation of (or manipulation by?) so many different forms simultaneously. The result is a fascinating series of tensions arising from Ice-T's ability to inhabit conflicting pop-cultural roles including: 'hardcore' gangsta rapper and dedicated philanthropist; author of controversial song Cop Killer and network television cop; self-proclaimed 'pimp' and reality television house husband. As the essays in this collection detail, Ice-T's chameleonic public image consistently tests the accepted parameters of black cultural production, and in doing so illuminates the contradictions of a society erroneously dubbed 'post-racial'.

Cover songs operate as a form of cultural discourse across various musical genres and different societal, historical and political conditions. Employing both textual and contextual analysis, cases studies include a comparative analysis of Jimi Hendrix's and Whitney Houston's versions of ""The Star-Spangled Banner"" as well as mapping the trajectory of ""(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"" from the original version by the Rolling Stones through cover versions by Otis Redding, Devo and Britney Spears. The radical deconstruction of pop and rock songs by the Residents and Laibach is also examined, with additional case studies of cover songs ranging from Van Halen, Kim Wilde, Rufus Harley, the Four Tops, Pat Boone and Johnny Cash. Rather than questions of quality and how a given cover song measures up as ""better or worse"" than other versions, this book focuses on the ideological implications and social stakes of the ""same old songs"" as they are reconfigured in numerous ways to consider, comment on and confront political issues of gender, sexuality, race, the nation-state and the generation gap.

This book is an ethnographic investigation of punk subculture as well as a treatise on the importance of place: a location with both physical form and cultural meaning. Rather than examining punk as a "sound" or a "style" as many previous works have done, it investigates the places that the subculture occupies and the cultural practices tied to those spaces. Since social groups need spaces of their own to practice their way of life, this work relates punk values and practices to the forms of their built environments. As not all social groups have an equal ability to secure their own spaces, the book also explores the strategies punks use to maintain space and what happens when they fail to do so.

Rock and roll music evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, as a combination of African American blues, country, pop, and gospel music produced a new musical genre. Even as it captured the ears of the nation, rock and roll was the subject of controversy and contention. The music intertwined with the social, political, and economic changes reshaping America and contributed to the rise of the youth culture that remains a potent cultural force today. A comprehensive understanding of post-World War II U.S. history would be incomplete without a basic knowledge of this cultural phenomenon and its widespread impact. In this short book, bolstered by primary source documents, Mitchell K. Hall explores the change in musical style represented by rock and roll, changes in technology and business practices, regional and racial implications of this new music, and the global influences of the music. The Emergence of Rock and Roll explains the huge influence that one cultural moment can have in the history of a nation.

Black Music, Black Poetry offers readers a fuller appreciation of the diversity of approaches to reading black American poetry. It does so by linking a diverse body of poetry to musical genres that range from the spirituals to contemporary jazz. The poetry of familiar figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes and less well-known poets like Harryette Mullen or the lyricist to Pharaoh Sanders, Amos Leon Thomas, is scrutinized in relation to a musical tradition contemporaneous with the lifetime of each poet. Black music is considered the strongest representation of black American communal consciousness; and black poetry, by drawing upon such a musical legacy, lays claim to a powerful and enduring black aesthetic. The contributors to this volume take on issues of black cultural authenticity, of musical imitation, and of poetic performance as displayed in the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Amiri Baraka, Michael Harper, Nathaniel Mackey, Jayne Cortez, Harryette Mullen, and Amos Leon Thomas. Taken together, these essays offer a rich examination of the breath of black poetry and the ties it has to the rhythms and forms of black music and the influence of black music on black poetic practice.

The late Jan Fairley (1949-2012) was a key figure in making world music a significant topic for popular music studies and an influential contributor to such world music magazines as fRoots and Songlines. This book celebrates her contribution to popular music scholarship by gathering her most important work together in a single place. The result is a richly informed and entertaining volume that will be of interest to all scholars in the field while also serving as an excellent introduction for students interested in popular music as a global phenomenon. Fairley's work was focused on the problems and possibilities of cross-cultural musical influences, fantasies and flows and on the importance of performing circuits and networks. Her interest in the details of music-making and in the lives of music-makers means that this collection is also an original and illuminating study of music and politics. In drawing on Jan Fairley's journalism, this volume also offers students a guide to various genres of world music, from Cuban son to flamenco, as well as an insight into the lives of such world music stars as Mercedes Sosa and Silvio RodrA guez. This is inspiring as well as essential reading.

'Counterculture' emerged as a term in the late 1960s and has been re-deployed in more recent decades in relation to other forms of cultural and socio-political phenomena. This volume provides an essential new academic scrutiny of the concept of 'counterculture' and a critical examination of the period and its heritage. Recent developments in sociological theory complicate and problematise theories developed in the 1960s, with digital technology, for example, providing an impetus for new understandings of counterculture. Music played a significant part in the way that the counterculture authored space in relation to articulations of community by providing a shared sense of collective identity. Not least, the heady mixture of genres provided a socio-cultural-political backdrop for distinctive musical practices and innovations which, in relation to counterculture ideology, provided a rich experiential setting in which different groups defined their relationship both to the local and international dimensions of the movement, so providing a sense of locality, community and collective identity.

Quincy Jones: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography and discography on one of the most prolific composers, arrangers, and conductors in American music. This reference work will appeal to wide range of musicologists, ethnomusicologists and cultural studies scholars.

Tempo: A Scarecrow Press Music Series on Rock, Pop, and Culture offers titles that explore rock and popular music through the lens of social and cultural history, revealing the dynamic relationship between musicians, music, and their milieu. Like other major art forms, rock and pop music comment on their cultural, political, and even economic situation, reflecting technological advances, psychological concerns, religious feelings, and artistic trends of the times. Like other major musical artists, Bruce Springsteen's work has reflected, revealed, and reacted to modern American realities over the course of his forty-year career. Since releasing his first record in 1973, Springsteen has sold more than a hundred million albums worldwide, played thousands of concerts, and won Grammy, Golden Globe, Emmy, and Academy awards. More importantly, however, he is one of the few twentieth-century singer-songwriters to serve as the voice of his generation, a defining artist whose works reflect the values, dreams, and concerns of many Americans. In Bruce Springsteen: American Poet and Prophet, Donald L. Deardorff II explores the works of "The Boss," defining the exact nature of Springsteen's cultural influence. With the release of seventeen studio albums, Springsteen's influence and popularity spans multiple generations. Deardorff classifies and explains Springsteen's remarkable reception as it evolved from small beginnings in the Jersey shore bars of the 1970s to worldwide fame today. This book thoughtfully considers the trenchant commentary Springsteen's albums make on the mythology of the American Dream, working-class concerns, the changing character of American masculinity, the relationship between Americans and their government, the importance of social justice, and the evocation of an American spirit. Bruce Springsteen: American Poet and Prophet will appeal to more than just Springsteen fans. It describes Springsteen as an apt critic of his own culture, whose music paints literary portraits that uncover the realities of an American society constantly evolving, while striving toward its own betterment.

Punk Rock Warlord explores the relevance of Joe Strummer within the continuing legacies of both punk rock and progressive politics. It is aimed at scholars and general readers interested in The Clash, punk culture, and the intersections between pop music and politics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Contributors to the collection represent a wide range of disciplines, including history, sociology, musicology, and literature; their work examines all phases of Strummer's career, from his early days as 'Woody' the busker to the whirlwind years as front man for The Clash, to the 'wilderness years' and Strummer's final days with the Mescaleros. Punk Rock Warlord offers an engaging survey of its subject, while at the same time challenging some of the historical narratives that have been constructed around Strummer the Punk Icon. The essays in Punk Rock Warlord address issues including John Graham Mellor's self-fashioning as 'Joe Strummer, rock revolutionary'; critical and media constructions of punk; and the singer's complicated and changing relationship to feminism and anti-racist politics. These diverse essays nevertheless cohere around the claim that Strummer's look, style, and musical repertoire are so rooted in both English and American cultures that he cannot finally be extricated from either.

Punk culture is currently having a revival worldwide and is poised to extend and mutate even more as youth unemployment and youth alienation increase in many countries of the world. In Russia, its power to have an impact and to shock is well illustrated by the state response to activist collective and punk band Pussy Riot. This book, based on extensive original research, examines the nature of punk culture in contemporary Russia. Drawing on interviews and observation, it explores the vibrant punk music scenes and the social relations underpinning them in three contrasting Russian cities. It relates punk to wider contemporary culture and uses the Russian example to discuss more generally what constitutes 'punk' today.

Almost 20 years ago Michael Brocken created from his doctoral research, what became both a seminal and contested volume concerning the social mores surrounding the British Folk Revival up to that point in time: The British Folk Revival 1944-2002. In this long-overdue second edition he revisits not only his own research, but also that of others from the 1990s and early 21st century. He then considers how a discourse of folkloric authenticity emerged in the closing years of the 19th century and how a worrying nationalistic immanence came to surround folk music and dance during the inter-war years. Brocken also proposes that the media: records, radio and TV in post-WWII folk revivalism can offer us important insights into how self-directed learning of the folk guitar emerged. Brocken moves on to consider the business structures of the contemporary folk scene and how relationships are formed between contemporary folk business and the digital and social media spheres. In his penultimate chapter he discusses the masculinisation of folk traditions and asks important questions about how our folk traditions are carried and are authorised. In the final chapter he also considers the rise of an exciting new folk live music built environment.

West Germany after the Second World War was a country in shock: estranged from its recent history, and adrift from the rest of Europe. This proved to be fertile ground for a generation of musicians who, from the 1960s onwards, would develop the experimental sounds that became known as Krautrock.

Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül II, Can, Kraftwerk - the influence of these groups upon popular music is incalculable. Future Days is an in-depth study of the music and the groups who made it.